Rocket Stove Aprovecho Research Center

Originally designed by Dr. Larry Winiarski and the Aprovecho Research Center, the Rocket Stove paved the way for high efficiency biomass stoves. Over 10,000 designs based on Rocket Stove principles have been introduced into over 30 developing countries on five continents.

The stove’s central element is the “Rocket Elbow,” a hollow, L-shaped shaft made of ceramic, clay or metal. The “elbow” sits within a metal or brick container and the space around the elbow filled with insulation such as pumice rock. The stove reaches temperatures above 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, consuming most of the smoke and gases generated by the fire.

In Uganda, Apovecho is implementing a Rocket Stove suitable for the large-scale cooking needs of institutions. In Honduras, Aprovecho, Trees, Water and People, and AHDESA, are developing micro-enterprise by training artisans and vendors to build and sell Rocket Stoves.

Aprovecho Research Center

PROLENA EcoStove
Aprovecho Research Center, Trees Water People, PROLENA Nicaragua

The PROLENA EcoStove is the continued evolution of Rocket Elbow technology. Born out of a partnership between Trees, Water & People, Aprovecho Research Center and PROLENA Nicaragua, the portable EcoStove is mass-produced in a factory in Managua, Nicaragua. In the past four years over 4,000 EcoStoves have been produced and installed across Nicaragua. The EcoStove model has been replicated in countries throughout Latin America. (more…)

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Explain this idea of “the material is the mechanism”.
It’s about moving away from the classical idea of materials - inert stuff that serves a structural role - towards the more contemporary notion of materials. More and more, materials are active and respond to stimuli in their environment. Materials can light up when an electric current is passed through them; materials can swell and contract in response to changes in temperature or acidity. Increasingly, there’s a blurring of boundaries between what is a material and what is a machine.

If you were to draw a materials family tree, where would you begin and what would be its main branches?
The main branches are ceramics (including rocks), which is the oldest branch of materials; natural materials (wood, leather, plant fibres, etc.), also very old; metals; and synthetic polymers. Since the 20th century, it would be fair to say that the introduction of synthetic polymers has been the biggest change we’ve seen in materials science. Things now, of course, are very diverse. The branch tips have split into countless categories, many of them overlapping. But one of the most significant has to be semiconductors.

Which natural materials have changed our lives or have the hope to change our future?
In addition to the ones I’ve already mentioned, there’s paper, which enabled the printing revolution. Looking ahead, we’re starting to explore nature more closely and use its principles to make new types of materials. Biological materials are made from either protein, where the raw materials are amino acids, or nucleic acids like DNA and RNA, or polysaccharides (carbohydrates), where the raw materials are sugars. Biology manages to do an incredibly wide range of things with proteins, in particular: horn, skin, tendon, and transparent material that makes up the lenses of our eyes. So materials scientists are inspired to look to proteins to see how they might be able to redesign them. For example, genetically engineered bacteria can produce new kinds of proteins that might create novel and biodegradable plastics. (more…)

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How is SELF helping to power small villages all over the developing world?
We use photovoltaics as the primary technology - solar cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity without burning any fossil fuels. This technology has been around since the 1950s, when NASA developed it to power satellites in space. Over the last few decades, there has been a steady advance in the efficiency with which these cells convert sunlight to electricity and in improved manufacturing processes, which help to lower their production costs. It has reached a point now where we can visit rural villages all over the world, places that have little hope of ever being connected to a conventional electric grid any time soon, and install panels directly on the homes, schools and clinics and generate clean solar electricity.

Two billion people still live in the dark. How can solar energy help to bring electricity to the entire world population?
Photovoltaics offer many benefits to the developing world. Because the panels can be quickly installed in very remote areas, you have an opportunity to bring immediate relief at the household level. This is what we did as a primary mission during our first decade; we focused on household lights using typically 50 watt systems, which generate enough power to run three or four lights, a radio and a couple of appliances in the home. As a result, we noticed a rapid increase in the quality of life. No longer were these people breathing in toxic kerosene fumes, children were studying and reading at night, and entire families were engaged in productive activities during the evening hours.

How does SELF financially assist the families acquire these solar home systems?
Even though we’re a non-profit organization, we did not believe that giving the systems away outright was a smart thing to do. On the other hand, asking families to pay $400 or more in cash for a solar home system is just prohibitively expensive. So we used micro-credit and other innovative forms of financing that would allow these families in developing countries to pay for and take ownership of these solar electric systems over a period of time. We proved through a series of pilot projects in about eleven countries that if you can provide the access to credit, rural credit, many of these families who are already spending five dollars or in some cases ten dollars a month on candles, kerosene, and small dry cell batteries to power radios, that they were able and willing to pay for solar electricity. (more…)

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What does it mean that war is now mediated through technology?
Today not only the act of war itself, but also the perception of war is a technological event. In a significant way, there are always two theatres of war: actual battlefields with real casualties and immense suffering, and hyperreal battlefields where the ultimate objective of the war machine is to conquer public opinion and manipulate human imagination. Particularly since 9/11 and the prosecution of the so-called “war on terrorism,” we live in a media environment which is aimed at the total mobilization of the population for warfare. For example, in the American “homeland,” mobilization of the population is psychologically conditioned by an image matrix, fostering deep feelings of fear and insecurity. This is reinforced daily by the mass media operating as a repetition-machine: repeating, that is, the message of the threatening “terrorist” Other. For those living in the increasingly armed bunker of North America and Europe, we don’t experience wars in any way except through the psychological control of perception through mass media, particularly television. The delivery of weapons - themselves intensely sophisticated forms of technology - are part of the same system. So tech-mediated war is the total mobilization for warfare with us as its primary subjects and targets.

What is the effect of our seeing from the bomb’s eye view?
Perhaps human vision itself has now been literally harvested by the war machine. When we see the unfolding world from the bomb’s eye view, this would mean that what we traditionally have meant by human perception - vision, insight, ethical judgment, discriminating between reality and illusion - has been effectively shut down, almost surgically replaced by the virtual vision machine of the militarized imagination. We are suddenly rendered vulnerable to the new virtual myths about the supposedly hygienic character of post-human warfare. For instance, the spectacle of the bomb’s eye view supports the illusion of war as being about so-called “smart” bombs, which are hyped as controllable in their targeting trajectories, with few civilian casualties. The audience becomes a spectator of this act, but it’s a complete fabrication. Only long after the first Iraq war was it revealed that many of the cruise missile shots, which were supposed to be precise in their “target acquisitions,” may have been staged video shots. The reality of that war had to do with massive bombing raids and anti-personnel cluster weapons, all of which were deliberately aimed at civilian populations. (more…)